


Mad Kings

by Merakimi



Category: EXO (Band), SHINee
Genre: Insanity, Kai - Freeform, King - Freeform, M/M, Soulmates, magical au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-07 03:46:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12832629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merakimi/pseuds/Merakimi
Summary: "What do you suppose happens when one dies with only half of its soul?""It makes one insane."~Kai is a king whose crown of madness glitters in blood-dipped thorns, as he stands alone in a blizzard of ice.Taemin is a boy whose back is scarred, whose innocence is an art.





	1. Hidden treasures

**Author's Note:**

> Taekai fanfic, inspired by Beynox's amazing edit on youtube and Aezsia Luitz's theory in the comments!

 

 

 

Two broken souls,

 

Two cold hands

 

Trembling lips whispering

 

Hushed voices lost in a mist

 

 

~ * ~

Love was always a luxury for the broken ones.  
A desperate voice, hidden behind a door, cries of longing glistening in the lock, plated in copper leaves.  
Taemin knows nothing of such callings, such voices, such emotions.

He was merely a dreamer, who tended to plain notes, simple words, gracing them with his beautiful tongue, his pale hands, for a breath of sweet life that dies once it leaves his eyes in a scream.

In a world of blooming lilies and dust, he nurses a tune from a broken piano. The forgotten melody dripped with arabesques of honey and golden keys.  
A golden key, in particular, fit to Taemin's slender fingers, that only youth's boyish curiosity could lock in a large engraved door. Decaying in the forbidden attic wall.

Taemin’s grandfather’s attic was a heap of secrets.  
The smell of old sins laced singed letters,  
In a corner lay a desolate pile of marionnettes,  
Scattered antiques whispered foreign treasures.

The click of the curious key was a hidden melody,  
The unveiling of a forbidden secret;  
Something that made one’s blood pulse with the quickened sense of danger.

It was spring in his grandfather’s moulded attic.  
One step across a small door frame,  
One step across space and time,  
One step closer to escape.

Darkness whirled and screamed and crushed Taemin’s limbs,  
A pounding pressure in his head,  
And it all stopped.

Snow greets his clammy palms.  
He looks up, pale and trembling.  
A beautiful creature poses before him, its fur glistening in a cold sun, eyes hard and blue.

Taemin feels ice wrap itself like snakes around his fingers.  
He sees three thin rings on his outstretched right hand,  
Small cursive is engraved on the silver.

Love, Strength, Eternity

The leopard’s eyes bore into him, and their piercing azur murmured in his head;  
“The rings are your anchor. Your protection. Keep them.”  
The animal’s tail flickers back and forth, its pupils narrowed in almost distaste as he stands.

Taemin knows nothing of adventure. He knows nothing of magic or nightmares, except for his life which had been a horrifying cocktail of fear and pain.

The leopard leads him silently across empty valleys of snow,  
To an empty castle dark of sorrow,  
To a caved soul whose last hope had arrived, pale and wide-eyed.

~~

Music played where there were no strings  
Shadows painted the marble pillars in cold whispers  
Their black tongues dissolved in achromatic blurs,  
That lulled to sleep all beautiful things.

A haunting tune twirls around the shattered chandeliers.

A broken, soulless echo of the same melody played in another world of blooming lilies and dust.  
It imitates and mocks him, leering with false teeth and decaying trebles.

Frozen notes refract in the cracked crystal.  
The melody sticks to Taemin’s footsteps, and drags him to their secret crescendo.

It’s a palace of dying extravagance; from the embroidered tapisseries to stone busts of past heirs, to the silver teacups whose dust appears untouched for centuries, to the threads of gold that fray the seams of abandoned dresses and reflected in the broken glints of shattered mirrors.

The tune resonates in the crevices of a high painted ceiling,  
Prelapsarian gods dance on decaying acrylic and crumbling clouds,  
Carved mythical legends are fossilized in the stone.

The dimmed orchestra sinks into the architecture’s golden arches,  
Sibylline symphonies die under the flick of His wrist.

~

He sits upon a throne of ice.

With a crown of thorns that imprisons echoes of madness,  
With eyes narrowed and glazed,

Kai beckons with a slender finger, like placing a bishop on a checkered board.  
His victim steps forward, breathless awe exposing his soul.

“Who are you?”

Taemin’s blood chills at the answer of pitched laughter from the broken man before him.

Snowflakes sprawl their frozen fingers on the looming glass behind.

Hushed voices resonate from the cold wind to Kai’s stretched grin.

“Me? Why, I’m the mad king.”

~~

Kai waves off the mortal’s presence as another one of the countless disfigured mirages of his own insanity.

For madness makes one suffocate where there is nothing.

“Do come, they’re about to perform for me.”

Kai grins and motions gracefully to his right.  
There was no one there.

Taemin’s lack of reaction angered the king.

“Don’t you see them dancing? Don’t you see them slashing each other’s limbs with knifes of steel? Don’t you hear the agonising screams as they choke on their own blood-soaked tongues?”

Kai’s eyes widen in morbid fascination for the invisible theater, a psychotic laugh prancing on his lips.

“I hear them all the time.”

Taemin is terrified.  
Yet he feels frozen to the stone.

“I see creatures of hell crawling on the sides of this luxury prison made for one. I see flames and hear rasping voices crying for me to end it all. I have tried. My blood never leaves me, and my soul is shattered. I can’t escape.”  
The grinning king twirls his fingers on ghost arabesques.

Taemin’s breath seizes him.  
What was it about this mad king, the cruel visions, that enthralled him?

Is it the tanned skin that seems exotic and lustful,  
Is it the cryptic way his voice carries in pitched mockery against his own world ,  
Or maybe even, the very danger in his beautiful eyes as they hold all the tears of tragedy and the veins of sin?

The rings on his fingers burn.

Taemin only knows that he cannot leave.  
And he doesn’t know why.

~~

Kai’s lips curl in disgust.  
“A key?”

The syllable falls off his tongue, bitter.

“A golden key to enter my prison… how ironic.” He snarls.

“How did you end up here?”

Taemin regrets the words that leave his own dry mouth.

Kai’s laughter is forced, choked.

“You’re just a vision of my curse, you should know.”

He talks anyway.

“A dear little witch found revenge on me, after my passionate murder on her sister. The Duchess was quite a pretty girl with a foul mouth. Who could blame me for sticking a knife in her silken breast? They’re all going to die, one way or another. What does it differ whether it’s by my glove-laced hands, or an ugly beater with a gun? The witch didn’t see the beauty in my sins. And I had no desire to be forgiven. So, in her fury, she cursed me with insanity and an empty crown drowned in eternal winter.”

He spins around, palms open as though to display the rusted nails of a mad prophet.

“And so here I am! Alone, Starved, Mad, with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. This castle reeks of my massacre’s ghosts, from the heir to the very last peasant, the whole kingdom haunts these walls.  
The moon is crimson, the sun is black, and the stars weep. I have shadows who obey my command, and demons who defy them.  
Welcome, to my personal hell.”

Kai finished with a reverence laced with cruel irony.

He saunters over and places a hand on his visitor.  
He expected his hand to go through a ghost, as it always did.  
The hologram of insanity would tremble at his touch.

But Taemin’s shoulder is of flesh and bone.  
Kai can feel the fabric of his shirt beneath his fingertips.  
The king blanches in his demarche.

He snaps back his trembling hand as though the cotton were coals.  
Taemin’s expression is curious, pure, real.  
From the dark lashes, the wide eyes, to the high-cheekbones flushed with rose-tainted wonder, and wide parted lips.  
Taemin was real.

Kai launches far backwards in fear.  
“Who are you” He gasps.

The king’s breaths are short,  
The boy’s heart is calm.

“I’m Taemin.”

The name stirs Kai’s blood. It curls around his tongue and caresses his neck, murmuring that someone had pried open the frozen bars of his prison.

A shadow turns into a knife in his hand, and he hurls it across the room.  
It slits Taemin’s arm.  
The immediate scream enrages Kai.

Crimson liquid seeps through the fabric, the red too bright against white.  
Taemin clutches his wound, heart pounding. His blood is cold and stains his fingers in splattered horror.  
Pain slices his mind. The cut is deep.  
The king is blurred and faded in his tear-stricken vision.

Kai stands before the agonising mortal, blank.  
It was the first time he’d ever missed his bull’s-eye.  
Taemin gasps behind clenched teeth.  
The sound tears Kai.

“You don’t want to be caged with a lion.”  
His tone is flat, and he vanishes in the shadows.

~~

Taemin is alone in the royal room, the fossilized engravings stare at him with marble eyes.  
Shivering as shadows lick his wound with airy tongues, he feels his skin slowly pulling over the gash, invisible hands stitching with trembling precision.

He looks down, and there is no more but a scar.  
He looks around, and there are no more but the king’s words.

Words, words, words.  
They all resonate and warp his mind in thick smoke. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s afraid. He wants to stay. He wants to run.

Why couldn’t he bring himself to leave? Something was here, something inside the king’s eyes had already slipped chains around his soul.

He was already caged with the lion.

 

~ * ~

 

For three days and three nights, Taemin slunk around the empty rooms, tracing circles on dusted armoires.  
Voices still flashed their foreign whispers throughout the castle, but he no longer feared them.

On the third day, Taemin stepped outside.  
In another world, this time would be hazy with first drinks and cocktail-dressed small talk over hors d’oeuvres.

Here, this time was white as ever, the grey mist coating the valleys in faded patches of dusk.

Kai stands outside, body moving to the flow of falling snow.  
Eyes closed, expression in a dream.  
His dance was an art. His steps painted hard beauty on a canvas of cold, with colors of fuschia skies and cerulean flowers.

The screaming madness that wrought his brains and whose thorns drew his blue blood in drips of agony, all vanished in the whirl of snowflakes, leaving place to an elegant ballet.

Kai dances to a mute crescendo, his mouvements gradually breaking into something wide and mad, steccato moves slice the cold air.

The porcelain composure that had briefly gleamed with angelic perfection was fragmenting piece by piece before Taemin’s very eyes, the horrible spell seeping through the cracks of serenity.

Yet, there was something beautiful about it all. It was like watching an artist change palette in a moment of passionate frenzy.  
He angrily streaks over the blues and purples, and strikes the painting with hues of black and shades of the devil.  
The final picture turns into something strangely more mysterious, layers of color fading into the night, drips of darkness seeping into the light.

Kai twirls and leaps, eyes narrowed, muscles tensing.  
He ends on his knees, broken, shaking.

Taemin places a daring hand on his shoulder, only to step back at the evil that flared before him.

He feels the ice against his back as he looks up at the arm pressed against his throat.

Gone was the peacefully cold ballet.  
In its place; a mad devil.

“Wasn’t that wonderful? Where’s the applause? Didn’t watching me decompose into a foul corpse rotten by insanity seed some horrible fascination in your pathetic mortal brain?”

The venom dripping from each syllable sear Taemin’s throat.

He doesn’t know why, but the poison doesn’t faze him. He feels a strange ache for the king’s alluring madness, for his enchanting art. Almost unconsciously, he reaches out a trembling hand to run his cold fingers through the king’s hair, careful to only graze the jeweled thorns.

Tongue steered by his soul, Taemin whispers,  
“You’re more than a show or a science. You’re an art that makes sin look beautiful.”

~ * ~

Time trickled its white grains of sand in the form of snowflakes, always drifting elsewhere, always out of one’s grasp, and disappearing once it settles on one’s palm.

Taemin and Kai revolved around each other in Time’s winter beauty, sometimes brushing fingertips, sometimes locking gazes.  
Eye to eye, hand to hand.  
Hesitant, prowling along the tight-wire of sanity that threads into the teetering rope of madness.  
Closer, closer, with each step in the whirl of this cold Time.

Kai had looked at his pretty visitor with a caution and envy that seeped from the spell. Kai had murdered hundreds without blinking, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to touch the beautiful boy. Even on their first encounter, when he had missed, it was almost a lost heart inside him that had veered the knife. Throughout the days, he had come to slowly crave Taemin’s light, his words that were few but held the intoxicating perfume of poetry from other lands.

Taemin had trembled at the king’s crown whose thorns glinted with golden danger. Now, he awed at how precious Kai’s smiles were, and how his dance was of a far finer masterpiece than that of any other world.

They were different. Light and dark.  
On days when the darkness consumed Kai, the two were hesitant strangers, skittering along the lines of dangerous madness and curious fear.

On nights when there was no glare of blinding white cold, the two were something more than a king and a passerby, dissolving into hidden smiles under soft moonlight.

~ * ~

Taemin’s leather-bound book is small in Kai’s hands.  
His eyes skim the yellowed pages, the strange characters leaping to-and-fro in black arabesques. The neat syllables seem to hiss at him in foreign tongues, dying in a chorus of crushed mezzos before they’re able to reach their inked nails to claw at one’s brain.

Kai wants to fling the thing into the shadows, as though it bore the flames of hell.  
He doesn’t realise his hands are shaking until a soft breath caresses the back of his neck.

“It’s japanese”

Taemin leans over Kai’s shoulder, a long finger trailing over the ink.

“The lamp once out  
Cool stars enter  
The window frame.  
Plum flower temple:  
Voices rise  
From the foothills  
The crow has flown away:  
swaying in the evening sun,  
a leafless tree.”

All the harsh voices, the terrifying alien letters that had screamed at Kai, all hush at Taemin’s voice that gently leads them to sit in silence below a roof of stars.  
Taemin smiles at the long-forgotten Haiku. One of his only possessions permitted by his grandfather, the book had settled in his coat pocket years ago, leather-tied pages that had slipped into this new world as quietly as the mumbling poems.

Kai’s vision glazes and shifts to colorful kaleidoscopes of black ink and pink lips.

“Teach me”  
~  
The swish of the brush resonates against the parchment. The soft sound curls around Kai’s hair that falls delicately over his furrowed brows, before gliding across Taemin’s skin.  
At the last swift flick, he lifts the brush, exposing the final character.

“Seikatsu. Life.” Taemin grins.

They continued until their shadows fell to dusk, until the cold stone room was decorated in flying sheets of paper, inked with symbols that gave the ice a breath of dream.  
~

 

Moonlight fractures in diamonds through the glass roof and shimmers across Taemin’s hands.

Soft steps echo in the conservatory before stopping to look at the lad that lies on the stone floor.

Beauty clings to Taemin’s eyelashes like pearls of rain. The curves of his collarbones dip and run across like carved ivory as his chest falls, a breath of soft wonder materialising before his rose-petaled lips.

The room is cold.  
The boy is warmth.

Kai lies next to him.  
“Don’t you miss your world?”

Kai’s question is merely a whisper.

“Sometimes.”

“What’s it like?”

A smile curls onto Taemin’s lips.

“It’s light and dark. There are flowers that bloom in symphonies of colour, and die in diminuendos of winter. There are people, too many, all different, all loving, hating, and speaking words that mean nothing. There are hundreds of colored flags fluttering proudly on their golden banisters, medals of patriotic pride, fake smiles and silk dresses. There are shadows, there is a sun, there is corruption and war, and there is wonder and art.  
It’s a pretty mess.”

The young king turns on his side to look at the boy.  
Taemin doesn’t speak of the raw marks on his back; harsh footprints of his grandfather’s rage. He can feel the wounds as he shifts, but chooses to numb them.

Instead, his lips continue to move, recounting stories of hope and lost pennies.  
Kai hears only a pretty melody.

Their intertwined hands piece together perfectly.  
Taemin’s silver rings are cold against Kai’s lips.

Taemin hushes the rings’ names: “Love, Strength, Eternity”, between each kiss that Kai places on his fingers.  
Kai doesn’t know that he kisses the one thing that protects the human from the monster.

From the king.

~ * ~

Taemin meanders down the twisting hallways in hope of stumbling upon a perfume of mystery to occupy his mind.

Hundreds of portraits line the left wing, dozens of sculptures ornate the right.  
The paintings vary in size, but little in concept; all are sombre backdrops with serious expressions, delicate hands modest and hidden, flashes of medals and pearls in corsets.

Here and there, there is a small scene of children by a mountain field, but what was once flowers and sunshine is now withered and grey.

His eyes scan the dripping acrylic, finger skimming over the artists’ dead signatures. He stops at the corner, the border of a vast golden frame limiting his vision. Taemin steps back to sink in the splendor of the biggest portrait in the castle.

The man wears a crisp uniform, navy blue, medallions shimmering like the gold of his hair, reflecting onto the ruby-hilted sword that rests in his imposing hands.

Taemin narrows onto the soft traits that crease the man’s forehead and corners of his eyes and lips.  
They were so familiar, just out of Taemin’s grasp. The expression seemed… too kind?  
Too kind for the rough hands and slight despising furrow in his brow?

Taemin’s breath catches when he realises;  
His grandfather.

He now saw everything, but recognised nothing.

He knew only the hard hands, that wielded the painted sword, who would use to beat Taemin black and blue on days when the mood would please him.  
Taemin still remembered his own lone pleas and cries of agony in the dark, when he could feel nothing but the pain on his skin coming from the man with silver hair and sharp eyes.

But this man’s hair was golden, and sitting perfectly atop, was a crown.

This royal’s expression was light, not a sign of a cruel abuser guilted the traits.

“Come to pay a visit to the old bastard?”

A snicker next to him makes Taemin jump.

Kai continued, cocking his head at the portrait.  
“King Jeonghun. Didn’t live up to to his title, I found. Grim, and far too cheap for my taste. Shame that he fled out of my knife’s grasp. He was a coward, really.”

King.

Taemin’s eyes darted between the painted jewels, to the ones tangled in Kai’s hair, until the two blurred into one.

“His crown suits me far better, does it not?”

Kai grinned, exposing teeth that seemed too sharp.

The world seems to spin. Taemin manages a weak smile.

“Far better.”

~~

It was dawn, a time where a sun used to thread its golden fingers through the stained glass and carpeted floors, stretching over delicate creases of velvet beds.

But when Kai rolled over with lazy wake, there was no more velvet, so soft to the touch, there was no chirrup of the morning robin, killed by the frost, there was no color.  
He was filled with a sudden nostalgia for a beautiful time that had once danced in the palm of his hand, only to be crushed like grapes against his greedy tongue.

The word “duke” had been used for him one too many times, had seemed to stick to him like tar.

The word “king” had never been meant for him, yet his entire being savoured it like a forbidden fruit.

He had lived in this castle’s full splendor, bathed in beauty and pleasure.  
Royalty, champagne.  
Corruption and pain.

Blood. Lust.  
A bitter cocktail of the two hazed the senses, made one ravenous for power.

Screams. Sin.

A chant of vengeful latin words, the pungent smell of burning lavender, and he had suddenly found himself devoid of color, devoid of love.

His vision became muddled, his mind jeered.  
And all was grey.

“I can’t remember.”

Kai’s lower lip trembles and the harsh tongues slither across his thoughts.  
He couldn’t remember the feeling of daisies against his cheek, the warmth of a sun, nor the sound of wine-dipped music.  
All that was left were his old sins. The darkness. The anger.

Ghosts begin to howl in his writhing mind,  
They reach for his throat with trembling hands,  
Pale and white, grasping thin air for their last grains of sand,  
Death hissed their last words, unkind.

Warm blood coated his hands. The liquid dripped onto the stone, torture.  
Faint bodies scattered the floor, corpses hovering by a thread, glowing by a shimmer. Gashes of pure horror ripped their silk dresses, petrified arms holding lace gloves over gushing wounds.  
They stare back at him with dead eyes, mouths agape in choked screams.

Something grabs his ankle.  
He looks down to the Duchess, her silver corset slit, crimson liquid spotting the porcelain beauty like the marks of a hunted leopard.

Her once bright eyes now bore into him like blue marbles, dead.  
Her lips moved listlessly, their delicate curves now cut and dry.  
“Kai-ah, kiss me just one last time”

Her grip tightened and the dreaded lush bedroom flashed again before him.  
The smell of hot love and faded opium, long gone, impregnated his senses and soaked his skin once again, vivid, alive at the will of her ghost words.  
He remembered her soft hair against his lips, he remembered her deathly words as he buttoned his shirt, he remembered his knife in her small chest.

Rage burns him and a shadow materialises into a sword in his palm. His arms move in a swift motion, but the minute her neck is hanging by a mere tendon, the body flickers and dissolves like sugar in water.

He desperately flings the sword to spear another’s chest, with no reaction.  
They litter the floor in silent screams, all dead.

Kai’s whole body shakes with terror.

There was the castle’s cook, his white apron gashed with chicken’s blood and his own, the peasant girl who would bring Kai flowers with hopeful eyes, holding a withered daisy in her hand, the king’s governor, his own silver gun glinting like a dark stain on his brilliant medals, the old farmer whose wrinkles had always been kind, the little boy, who lay as dead as the broken toy at his feet, the sour maid whose only expression was the one of horror that had been petrified on her face, the newborn child whose last blood covered him like his first day, the exquisite court ladies whose silver pins fell in disheveled beauty around their porcelain faces, slashed dresses exposing curves of pale skin.

He remembered the entire kingdom.  
And they were all dead.  
All had been murdered by his silver hands.

He grabs a shard of glass, and all he sees are Taemin’s beautiful fingers, the ink swirling on yellowed paper, Taemin’s soft breath against his neck as he whispered “Seikatsu. Life.”

Then, Kai was broken. He was the glass that he dragged across his own skin, he was the blood that flowed down his arm, he was the tears that scorched his eyes, he was his desperate cries of “They’re not dead, they’re not dead.”

Taemin’s peaceful japanese character now was engraved in a gnarled, ripped mixture of cuts and blood on Kai’s forearm.

“Seikatsu. Life. They’re not dead. They’re still alive. They have to be.”

But the same graveyard of his sins sprawled before him, a field of gore crawling around his ankles as his flinching past.  
Sobs wrack his body and seize his lungs.

Hands grab him, supple, pale, but alive. Real.  
They caress him, shake him, wake him.  
Taemin finally cups the latter’s cheek to pull his gaze towards him.

“Kai…”

His name had never been uttered with such raw love in every crease of the soft palm, every curve of the trembling lip. Kai had never seen a tear being shed for his sake.

The moment was almost a flashback to a dance of ethereal sorrow, a symphony of evil. But this time, Kai wasn’t a perfectly composed ballet. Instead, he was the angrily crossed sketches, the crumpled pieces of paper in a dimmed room, shredded dreams screamed in agony on an empty stage. In that moment, Kai was the broken artist, tormented by the voices that shrieked for an encore, when he, as a quartered puppet, could move no more.

And Taemin was the stars, peering through the curtain of empty universe, only able to shed a tear of melancholy, wilfully reaching out a hand, out of Time’s grasp, for the dying artist. Oh, how desperately he wanted to hold him, to tell him that the world is all a tragedy of beauty, that the crown of madness doesn’t have to be his.

A tear touches Taemin’s lips. His own.

“They’re all dead. They won’t come back.” Kai chokes. He can almost taste their metallic screams on his tongue.

Taemin hushes him, hands skimming over his face, grasping last threadbare hope, trying to piece shattered glass back together.

“They're not real. I'm real. You’re here. You’re alive.”

Kai raises his ashen head.

“Don’t you see Tae? I’m already dead. I’ve been killed like the rest of them. This place has murdered me.”

His lower lip trembles, and suddenly, there was the warmth of Taemin’s arms, heads buried in chests, delicate words whispered against tousled hair.

And there was peace.  
No more blood, no more pain, only Taemin’s lips, Taemin’s arms.  
Kai sinks into his touch, soaking in every line and every breath, the count of his steady heartbeat that told him he was alive, that this was real.

The monsters that haunted Kai were mere shadows to Taemin, lurking as invisible panthers beneath the ringed cage on his fingers.

In that moment of pure agony and love, Taemin saw his own suffering replaying itself in his arms. For Taemin knew what it was like; to suffer alone.  
The scars on his skin, as well as his heart, ached as Kai let out shaky breaths onto fistfuls of his tear-stained shirt.

Taemin buried his face in Kai’s neck as he held him tighter, and made a solemn vow, that no curtain of light, no hands of spite would distance them no more.  
He wouldn’t let his king suffer alone. Suffer like how he had.

~ * ~

Two hands: one bloody, one pale.  
Two souls dappled in something along the lines of beautiful sins and dangerous love.  
Two spirits who moulded together, the way colored sand layers itself grain by grain, dark by light, sin by love.

Outside, a blade of grass has speared the ice, a daisy has grown from the crystals.

~ * ~

Taemin sits back against the wall, hands running through his hair, combing his thoughts.

The leopard’s words of strength, love, eternity, of protection and anchors, all had lost their echo.

The rings were his protection… Against what? The madness? Kai’s knives that were wielded from the devil’s slaves? The thought was absurd, for he knew that even in pitch darkness, Kai would never dare find his own knife at Taemin’s throat.

His anchor… To where? His world which he had never cared for enough to call home? To an old king whose beatings had made Taemin’s life a living hell?

The painted crown, the glinting thorns in Kai’s locks… What had happened?  
Kai had sneered at a witch, old sin and lust. This kingdom had once gleamed with riches, life and sun, all smeared with the wind of a single spell. The old king Jeonghun had fled from Kai’s cursed madness, leaving the duke with a crown and a kingdom of death. Had no one ever wondered about where the old king had found refuge?

Well, I suppose they were too dead to ponder on such things.

The old king turned out to be the same old bastard that had abused Taemin from childhood in a world far from this one. Now, fate had placed small stepping stones on the trail to the castle, breaking folds of Time and fabrics of Space to escape from the abuse and find his true destiny.

Should he remove the rings, for animosity towards a place that had never been home, he would also be cursed. Insane, to be exact.

He’s seen Kai’s pain, the screaming agony of constant torture in the king’s mind.  
Would it be worth it, to share the suffering?

They could be together. The thought makes Taemin’s heart race. He pushes aside the thoughts of horror, sees only Kai’s bright smile and the passionate dancer.

Another minute and he feels like tearing the rings apart. He had made a promise to end Kai’s lone suffering. He would indulge himself in the same pain.

Taemin cries for the leopard to remove the rings.

Why, you wonder?

I suppose it is because Love makes one do crazy things.

~~

The snow leopard limps through the door at his request. Its head is hanging, and dark spots seem to stain the beautiful fur. It looks up at Taemin, a desperate soul, blinded by love, with utter sadness dripping like diamonds from its blue eyes.  
It walks three times around Taemin, tail curling around his neck as it did so.  
He closes his eyes.

The snow turns into earth and moist leaves, thick oak trees in a soft spinning wind. The animal poses with hunched dignity before a crumbling cabin, wood splintering, moss embedding the cracks, depression suffocating the failing architecture.

He opens the creaking door to a dark room where the smell of musk is heavy on his tongue, and blurred outlines of cracked statues and broken glass leer at him from the dim light.

“Ahhh… so the soulmate has arrived.”  
A voice with no face startles the wide-eyed visitor.

Soulmate.  
Was that who he was? That stirring feeling in his heart, that strange pull, that had drawn him to Kai, something truly more than mere curiosity; was it all a mere finding of his soul’s missing piece in the inked night? Soul-mates who had managed to grasp each other’s hands in an unfathomable night with no end.

The mystery person chuckles, and the sound seems to seep from the walls like the harsh vines.

“Do tell me… how is dear old Jeonghun?”

All the blood drains from Taemin’s face. The Witch. She was the one. It was all because of her.  
Taemin throws his shoulders back, grits his teeth.

“He’s horrible, but I assume you knew that. After all, this is all because of you.”

An audible smirk chills his fingers.

“Of course I knew, dear. And yet, here you are. Finally decided to stay?”

Taemin’s breathing quickens, his heart races.  
The minute the silver leaves his fingers, he would be exposed to a curse, stripped of everything until only his heart was left beating raw love into empty bones, he would be imprisoned in foreign ice, he would be only with Kai.

“On the table.”

He should know better than to obey the witch. But he discarded all hatred and fear in a flash. Without allowing a second thought to enter his mind, he pulls off the rings, and sets them on three perfected holes on a small nightable in the center of the room.

They emit a strong blue light, neon liquid shining in the dark.

A sudden wave of cold wind seizes his body, steals his breath.  
Taemin doubles over, arms wrapped around himself as though to prevent the ice from clawing his lungs.  
His mind crumbles like earth, maggots with harsh whispers writhe in his mind.

He thinks he hears the witch cackling, but he opens his eyes to complete black.  
Pain sinks its frosted teeth into his veins, until he wants to recoil into his own soul.

His lips are frozen, cracks of blood dry their once beautiful curves, and the only name he can utter is the only one that comes like oxygen to the dying;

“Kai…”

And the madness curses him.


	2. Neon Liquid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You're sin in its most beautiful personnification."

~ * ~

Taemin saunters into the castle, feeling free of thought.  
He laughs at no one in particular,  
The shadows obey his every touch,  
And the taste of black tea seems to linger on his tongue.

He grins and leaps from cloud to floor.  
He felt as though the stone were sand, the cold air were the salted spray that drizzled onto rays of sun.

How wonderful it all was!  
To imagine the cry of gulls instead of the falling snow, to want to reach out and brush an ocean’s song out of his locks…

“Taemin. Where have you been?”

Kai appears by his side, expression taunt, furious.

His visions had become less distorted after Taemin’s absence, cleared into agonizing images of the slender boy lying in snow, eyes wide and lips pale with ice, splattered with blood. His heart had tugged, hurt, ripped. What absence was fifteen moons, seemed to last thirty suns.

Taemin blinks, and laughs with a twirl.

“Kai-ah, isn’t the beach lovely? Come, let’s go on an adventure.”

The tone was all too familiar to Kai, the gestures to things that weren’t apparent, the glazed eyes.

~~

Kai pins Taemin against the stone wall.  
Taemin’s skin had lost all its warmth, been drained of color, was cold to the touch.  
His matte stare was excruciating.

Kai narrows his eyes, hands caging his victim.

“Who are you?”

Kai’s first words that he had uttered to the real Taemin had crept back onto his tongue, silent, foreign.

“I’m Taemin.”  
He grins, but it was cruel, off, as though someone had ripped apart his smile and glued it on backwards in a mad frenzy.

“What have you done.” 

Taemin raises a ringless hand with mad pride.  
“They’re gone. No more protection against the spell, no more home. I’m here to stay. Do I get a party?” 

Kai’s eyes widen in horror. 

No more protection against the spell. 

“Goddamit Taemin what were you thinking? This isn’t a game. It’s real. It’s a curse! It’ll tear you limb from limb and kill you. You can’t be like me.”

The anger pulses on his skin like black leeches as he yells at the latter, every muscle shaking.  
Taemin shrugs and his finger traces lazy lines on Kai’s shirt, centimeters away.

“I love you. My rings were of no use if they were to ‘protect’ me from the one thing I love.” 

He slips his arms around Kai’s waist. The words were like honey, but the intonation was bland. 

“We’re soulmates Kai. Didn’t you know? It was bound to happen. Now I can be insane for you.” 

Love. Soulmates. Words that now made Kai shiver in fear, for the person delivering them used Taemin’s pretty tongue but a rotten conscience. 

Things between them had always been unsaid. Kai didn’t know exactly when he had lived without Taemin, nor when he knew he couldn’t live without Taemin.  
Was it when he had asked him who he was? Taemin had come naturally, like how the moon breathes and dies for the sun. Everything had been silent, like how the stars sing and twirl in the void. 

Now, he longed for the Unsaid once more.

Taemin chuckles and the sound is deep and vibrates through Kai’s throat.

Taemin places his lips on Kai’s neck, pulls him closer.  
“Show me crazy love, my mad king.”

His breath is scalding, his hands tug at Kai. The king’s tainted soul succumbs to the low husk in Taemin’s voice, arches his neck, closes his eyes to his mirror of madness. Lust hazes conscience, focuses on lips and hooded lashes.  
The Unsaid is lost in the void, dies with a single burning touch.

Suddenly, sparks combust into flames, vibrations against throats, hands tugging hair, crushing mouths.  
Their love loses all rationality, tapering down to mad desire. Breathless in the mess of tongues, hands are guided to roughly palm throbbing members, cheshire smiles drawing against lips between the whimpers in response.

“I wonder, what pleases a king more than jewels and champagne?”  
Taemin hums, hands sliding up the hard, crowned muscles.

The king smirks, crawling on top of the latter.  
His breath beats the cold sheets, caresses his lover’s skin.  
“Why don’t you find out for yourself.”

The boundaries between two souls tainted in insanity evaporate in hot love. The need to feel one another is never enough, finally being able to clash the horizons.

They pieced together; jagged curves against smooth edges, palms touching hips, mouths delving into necks. Kai shudders a moan to Taemin’s sinful tongue that teases his sculpted thighs. Dark bruises pepper his skin, matching the ones on Taemin’s hips. 

Mad love gropes the king with lustful hands, and he closes his eyes to the molten pleasure that pulses in his veins.  
But how he craved Taemin’s taste.

He flips over to thrust into the other, relishing in his sharp gasps and moans of pleasure, the delicious, tight heat that made his head spin even more so, furiously ripping the latter’s shirt, urgency pounding in every vein, need like fire on his palms.

He stops when he sees the scars.  
Long gashes of rough skin stitch mangled patterns along Taemin’s back; a canvas of agony. 

Fury and horror chokes Kai. He removes himself with a shudder, pushes Taemin to turn, and sees the same carvings on the pale torso. Taemin looks at him, panting.

“Who did this to you?”

The sickening anger returns, and the feeling stirring in Kai’s abdomen is replaced with murder for whoever dared pain his lover.

“Some old bastard with a dirty crown hated my guts.”  
Taemin shrugs and his hands trace the outlines of Kai’s body. His tone is so cold… it makes Kai feel nothing but emptiness. All the fire had flickered out with a touch of iced insanity.

“But I was weak and alone. Now, I’m a psycho with his soulmate… Doesn’t that make a wonderful story? I can’t even feel my wounds anymore. Kai-ah, you never told me how good it is to be mad.”

Taemin chuckles and leaves loving marks on his king.

Kai stops breathing all together.  
He looks at the latter and wonders: Could he live with this dangerous, sinful, Taemin whose touch is scorching, whose eyes are dark, whose lips are intoxicating? 

The thought clouded his body in pleasure. Madness had made of Taemin the flesh of thrill, the pupils of jeweled mischief, the hands of loving sin.  
It was everything Kai’s demons craved.

But the tug in his chest, the gape in his soul ached for light.  
Taemin’s last ray had been snuffed by the curse, one that makes one lost, drags one in a mist of shadows. Kai was looking into the mirror of his own corruption. 

Kai’s senses wash over him, pungent with cruel reality.  
He quickly pushes Taemin off him, breath cut short. 

 

“Why?”

 

Taemin finally studies Kai beneath long lashes. 

“I had no home to return to, Kai. Everything you touched turned into my home. The rings were a shield between us. You were mad, and I couldn’t share your suffering. So I discarded them, to be with you, as a monster or not.”

“You know nothing. This isn’t a pretty haiku in a small book that you can close at will. This is a disease with no cure, a night with no end. Insanity imprisons you and makes you suffocate where there is nothing… It chokes you and draws your blood and inks you with poison until you’re just a rotting corpse with visions and a black soul. It turns you into me.”

“And I fell in love with you. I saw the beauty in you. I saw the boy who smiled at stories of daisies, the man who danced like the stars were on his feet. You were an art, Kai. A painting with colors of devilish hues, a scuplture carved of black-veined marble, a poem whose sonnets made the willow weep. And I loved every inch of you. Every smile, every dance.”

Taemin holds Kai’s hand and gifts him a soft kiss. His eyes briefly sparkle with the old radiance that made Kai’s heart fly. 

“But you also saw the monster backed into a corner screaming with visions. You did see the pain. And you soothed it.” Kai touches the pale cheek. “You took it all away for me, if even for a moment. I loved you because you were the only thing that was real and pure in this hell of visions, you were the only thing that didn’t try to break me. I found refuge in you, my light, my soulmate.”

Taemin tastes Kai’s tears on his lips as the king kisses him slowly, breaking.

“Don’t let me be alone.”  
The king whispers with trembling lips.

Taemin frowns and a sharp tug in his chest pains him. “I’m right here.”  
He had discarded his rings, to be with Kai… what was wrong?

The king’s crown seems to glisten with sapphire sadness.

“Madness has painted you translucent, you’ve turned into a ghost of visions. I need my Taemin back. The one who tells me haikus of flowers and art, the one who can ease my pain, the one who can laugh as though butterflies fluttered on his tongue. I need that Taemin. I won’t see my own destruction surge from the past and suck the life out of the one thing that I love. I refuse to see you suffer what I endure.”

He strokes Taemin’s cheek and holds him in a deep kiss.

When Taemin opens his eyes again, he’s alone, and the swooping madness brings pain of chills and screeches of purple ravens. The bitter taste of black tea is replaced with the metallic tongue of blood, drowning the love of Kai’s sweet lips, until he is left with nothing but the visions and cold.

~~  
Kai is whisked by his will to the world where fungus peer through the trees, ferns hang limply in a thin forest mist.  
He storms inside, the door flying off a rusted hinge. The witch sits in a shaft of light that casts shadows of deep wrinkles, who echted lines on her face like the rough engravings on a wand.

“No greetings? It’s been so long…” She turns from the window, cocking her head, darkness falling across the flasque face so that only a single amber eye is left glinting with malice in the dying sun.

“Enough games. Break the curse.”

“You must repent for your sins” She folds her hands in her lap.  
Kai emits a low growl and shoves his forearm in her face, engraved suffering raw on his skin, dry drips like painted lips on a mask.

“I have suffered enough by your wrinkled hands. Break the damn curse, free Taemin.”  
At the mention of Taemin, the witch smiles. “Ah, yes. The soulmate. Pretty young man.” 

“Just keep your damn spell off of him.” Kai seethes.

She grins ever more.  
“Do you know who abused him? Do you know where King Jeonghun fled to? What has he been up to all this time..?”

“You have no right to speak of Taemin’s wounds, and never utter the name of that filthy monarch who claimed himself the top. I’m the king now.”

“King Jeonghun is Taemin’s grandfather. I helped him flee to another world with a time that mended differently than ours, and he begun a new life. He was terrified of the prophecy of your salvation being fulfilled by his third generation, so he beat his own grandson to scare him from adventuring to you with the golden key. But fate does have its ways… shame really. I was having fun watching you scream.”

“You sick bitch. You cursed an entire kingdom with death as revenge, using me as your voodoo doll. And now, you have the nerve to watch me play out as a puppet to madness, clap your stupid hands to every spreading poison in my soul, to every scream in my lungs. Now, you see my foretold salvation coming like a storm to your open theater. You and your abusive coward of a monarch throw rotten heads as the curtain finally falls, but my soulmate and I have already fled into the arms of destiny. You, are powerless.”

“The arms of destiny resemble strangely to those of a silver leopard, of a murdered Duchess, don’t you think? I hold the power over Taemin’s light. Does that mean nothing to you now? I know how little you cared for Minyong.”

Kai shivers at the Duchess’ name. The witch hadn’t forgotten her sister. Kai thinks he hears a low mewl from outside. 

“I have no care for whose mask Destiny uses. It has brought me Taemin. He is so much more. You have already taken my soul. What does it bring you to have his as well?”

“Ah… but you just said it yourself my dear; He is so much more.”

Kai grabs her by the throat until her crumpled face is an ugly shade of purple. 

“Break the damn curse. You’ve had your fun. You reek of creeping death and clumsy spells. Your grains are trickling by and you hear them day and night while you shiver under the mask of shaking witchcraft. You knew I’d come back. You knew my soulmate would come. You knew there was a prophecy, a chance. But you hoped it to be false” He forces her to look at him, eyes dark, a snarl etched on his thick, chiseled lips, “Now you have the chance to end this game. It serves no more purpose, and the only one left at the table is you.”

Gasping for breath, she still manages to scratch a wicked smile. Kai flings her to the ground. He presses a foot to her chest as he stands, a shadow of murder draped in the veil of madness, glints of shimmering rings. His lips; now a thin line of ticking patience.

She wheezes as he increases the pressure on her chest. “Both of you... must be summoned here. The ritual is long... and can only be performed... on a crescent moon.” 

He is in the doorway in a flash. “I’ll be back. Mark your words true, for they will surely be your last.”

The snow leopard had been waiting outside, big, lonely eyes staring at Kai as he storms out. He doesn’t spare the delicate animal a glance as he orders: “Take me back.” 

~~

The castle seems colder than usual, emptier than the hollow cave in his gut. He shivers at the echo of his footsteps in the stone hallways, turning corners and turning thoughts. He remains silent, the witch’s words and crooked grin sear his mind. He was afraid of her, hated her. She knew more of Taemin’s past than himself. Kai clenched his jaw until he feels soft fur gliding over his ankle. The leopard was padding quietly beside him, eyes on its large paws.  
He frowns, but maybe the ghost of a smile flits across his lips.

Kai stops when he passes a room, a large window light shadows a tall figure.

Taemin stands surrounded by the soft winter glow, white light caressing the black locks that fall across glazed eyes, shading his scratched lines, until Taemin is but a painted silhouette before an angelic canvas that seems to drape him in beauty, innocence still drinking him in like a sweet cocktail as he grazes supple fingers over scribbled novels, stained maps.

“Surprised to see you back.”  
Taemin mutters, eyes not fluttering from the antiques.

Kai ignores the tug in his heart, brushes off the emotionless tone in the fashion in which he brushes past the tapisseries and specks of dust as he wraps his arms around the latter.

Taemin turns to him, a flash of betrayal in his eyes.  
He had been left alone with newborn demons, wailing sirens in his mind, clouding his thoughts with bloodlust for nothing, until he would open his eyes once again, finding his hands covered in glowing paint, dark blood, broken glass.

“You left me. Alone. It hurt.”

Taemin had cried himself into inked sleep, where he would wake, shaking, beads of cold sweat piercing his skin. Guilt. Pain. Solitude. Madness. Replay.

Kai’s laugh is flat with irony. “I thought madness felt so good.” he hisses, grip tightening.

Taemin bites his lip. “It did; when I couldn’t feel my wounds, when I could feel only you.”

“You never really listened did you? Even when I told you, even when you saw and felt things that weren’t real, you still thought it was wonderful. Even plunged in darkness, you sought for the light.” Kai shakes his head, “You’re too pure even for the most corrupted of spells. And that only makes you a delicious challenge for madness.”

Taemin’s gaze flickers beneath hooded lashes. “And am I? A delicious challenge for the finest demons?” His tongue tastes every syllable, hand traces painfully lower until the king emits a shuddered groan.

“Dammit Tae don’t you ever listen.”

“Why listen when you can be without a care in the world.”

“One minute you’re hurt, the next you’re enraged, and now you’re seductive.”  
Kai sighed. 

“Ah, but you recognise it all so well.” Taemin breathes, devil dancing across his lips. He discarded all fear, all nightmare, as madness had done for him so many times before. His soulmate had returned. He longed for his touch, his beauty, like an addictive cocktail, once more.

“I know it through every breath I take; inhaling ink, exhaling agony.”

“You lecture me like a scholar. Yet here it seems the student has observed more than the master. You drink my light, poetry like a storm, then spit back criticism the minute it strays from the usual style. Yet you also seem to yield my newfound darkness, like looking at me as I wear your clothes, secretly loving the way they fit. I know this Madness is a curse. But insanity is patches of moments, stitches of discolored emotions, flashing feelings. Moments where I feel wonderfully free before it all comes crashing back as the thread overlaps into the black fabrics. I know that. But let me be here with you, for now. Make me free, make me obsessed, make me love and your sculpted hands do my tainted soul undress.”

Taemin places his lips on Kai’s, his hands guiding the royal’s where he pleased.

“Just one last time. Before the cold melts like fire, let me be your pretty little psycho, satisfy all your mad desires.” 

“Your words are a poison. Drug me.”  
Kai breathes against the dips of his collarbones, the curves of his neck.  
His demons return, hissing, ragged breathing down his throat until his tainted soul needs the danger, the lust, the feel of Taemin’s tongue for a conflagration of psychotic pleasure; skin for color, moans for flames.

He raises his head to look at Taemin with hooded eyes, dark oak irises, dances of mad desire refracting inside with wrists of dashed gold and spiraled black. 

Taemin grins and runs a tongue between his teeth, crushing his mouth against his lover. “God you’re beautiful when you look at me like that.” He groans.

“You say insanity turns you into a rotting corpse with visions… yet you’re so enchanting, so alluring. Do your demons wear a mask of dark perfection? You’re sin, in its most beautiful personnification.”  
Taemin continues, placing chaste kisses on every curve of the tanned skin.

“This spell is different from corruption of champagne or lust. Its torture that pulls your entrails… crushes your soul. It does things… inside. But the mortal mind is foolish, blind... longing for everything one cannot have or see. Grasp helplessly for things... to quench our thirst for happiness… and somewhere along the way... happiness turns to lust. The sense of danger, adrenaline... is so much powerful... than mere contentment.”  
Kai breathes, hands running through hair, skimming arms, tugging clothes.

“And judging by the looks of it, even the mad ones love a little thrill.”  
Taemin’s eyes are dark with mischief, narrowed with challenge. 

“That is because thrill is everything our demons crave. It has a lovely voice.”  
He hums against Taemin’s neck, shivering in delight as his lover tugs his hair and drags hot nails against his neck - breathless.

“Make me free, make me obsessed, make me love and your sculpted hands do my tainted soul undress.”

Taemin’s delicious poison of words took Kai’s demons by the throat, until they shifted the kaleidoscope of light to refract into mirrors of night, reflecting patches of madness and threads of lust.

~~

Taemin wonders at the landscape from the highest turret, the cold air now an old friend as it caresses his cheeks until a slight blush taints them, dots his nose.

The balcony overlooks rolls of snow, blankets of white.  
But, for the first time in years, there is no snowfall. Small houses begin to poke through the cover, icicles dripping slowly, glistening water sliding along the rafters. Springs of moss creep through the ice, tufts of grass spear the barren mountainside. The kingdom’s eternal winter was melting. 

Taemin cocks his head and lazily traces swirls in the railing frost.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”  
Kai’s voice is husk from sleep, and it chills Taemin’s throat even more so than the air. 

“I think it looks like you.”  
Taemin whispers. 

Kai hums in interest and drowsily hugs Taemin from behind, resting his chin on his shoulder. 

“You’ve become soft, my king. You’re melting too.”

A sad grin tugs at Kai’s lips in response.

“It is strange. Everything seems to hurt a little more. Seems to be a little more real day by day. The soft glows and visions have dimmed. Maybe I am melting. Maybe it’s the fault of finally caring too much.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Love is about giving someone a gun and letting them decide how to wield it. You shove it in their hands in hope that they’ll use it to protect themselves. From evil. From madness. Because you love them. But you don’t expect the evil to grab their hand and turn it on you. So you end up getting shot, even if you only wanted to protect them.”  
Kai finishes softly, his hands shaking on Taemin’s shirt. 

Taemin frowns and turns. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Kai’s gaze is trained on the crystallized railing, bits of rust rupturing the smooth ice.  
“You don’t know that.”

“I promise.”

Kai breathes in Taemin’s hair, his heartbeat a steady pound of inked characters and singed paper grazing the cage of soft bones.  
Taemin sinks into the king’s oddly warm touch, the melting wax on a letter of promise, closing his eyes. 

Suddenly, white hot pain sears his head, screeching voices like sirens in his ears. He stumbles backwards, clutching his head, shaking, gasping. 

“No...No, don’t... stay away from me!” Taemin shrieks at Kai, eyes injected with glassy terror, beads of sweat trickling down his neck as he clutches his body as though to protect it.  
When Kai tries to pull him back to reality, back to him, Taemin pushes him away, rage and fear oozing from every tongue like the veins of a hundred monsters.

“This is all because of you. You made me suffer. You almost killed me because you were afraid that I would be happy. You hid cowardice behind a mask of fury, and now you dare order me around, call me a fucking psycho.”  
Taemin’s voice is raspy, his throat trembles, his eyes, white.  
Possessed. Terrified.

Kai’s face falls, a splintering sound coming from his heart echoes in his ears. His beautiful soulmate now stood before him, fangs of madness deep in his veins, sinking farther out of Kai’s grasp. All he could do was watch in agony as his love pushed him away, screamed at him until Kai feels the click of the dark gun against his temple, the deep chuckle of madness boring black eyes at him, soulmate in its fist like a flickering firefly.

Taemin’s madness trembled in terror at the crowns in Kai’s hair, for they had once belonged to a man whose touch still lay raw on Taemin’s skin.

Kai slowly tugged at the crown in his hair, the once delicate points which had morphed and melted in the fires of insanity, now thorns and jewels of mischief. He gently placed the diadem on the ground at taemin’s feet.

“I’m Kai. I’m a dancer, I’m a boy who fell in love with haikus, I’m a psycho with shadows, I’m a man who’s in love with you.”

 

For things between them had always been unsaid.

 

Taemin’s eyes suddenly widen. A caved soul with dilated pupils. 

“Kai-”

His lips murmur the word as though it had been discarded from the mind, but secretly hidden away inside the heart’s cupboard, the tongue rolling open a desolate drawer, empty polaroids of faded haikus, soft moonlights and snow-flecked ballets splaying across his fingertips, rushing in his veins.

~ Piercing through the storm of snow  
A deeply rooted flower blossoms  
This is the truth, when it may seem,  
Like it’s all over. ~

Taemin’s eyes meet Kai’s, and he immediately regrets it.  
For the minute their gazes lock, everything stops, everything breaks. 

Taemin wanted to see the dark oak irises, dances of mad desire refracting inside with wrists of dashed gold and spiraled black.  
But instead, the king’s eyes are glistening with something heavier than sorrow, something deeper than longing inside the kaleidoscope of tawny tears.  
The pupils seem like empty oceans that swallow Taemin whole, crushing and drowning him in soundless sobs until he can’t breathe, until the empty longing for their decaying love wells his throat in tears.

“So you end up getting shot, even if you only wanted to protect them.”

This boy, this man, this king stood before him as his soulmate, crushed by the stained corruption on his last light. 

“Kai... Kai-ah I’m so sorry…”  
Taemin wanted to scream in agony, but his voice loses its power with emotion, as it slips between his lips, a mere whisper.

“It’s alright, I’m here, it’s only me here.”  
Kai mumbles into his hair, Taemin’s body shaking with sobs against his chest.

“I can’t believe… someone tried to keep us apart for so long… What do you suppose happens when one dies with only half of its soul?”

Kai smiles bitterly.  
“It makes one insane.”

Taemin lets out a dry chuckle. “I was a fool in love. Seeing your pain, being reminded of mine… It wrung something inside me, and I couldn’t see… I only wanted to see your smile and your dance. I don’t really know what I wanted…” He trails off, thoughts that trip and stumble off his mouth and that whimper in childish shame as he lowers his head. He had been a fool. He curses himself, anger slowly gnawing his gut. It chews and spits in his face all his idiocy and weaknesses until he feels bile in his throat. 

“God Kai what have I done.”

Kai’s heart squeezes, physical burning his chest. He hated this. He hated seeing his love in such unjust pain. Taemin-beautiful, enchanting Taemin… cursed. Mad. Yet he wore madness like a fine jewel… until the diamonds pierce the skin. And all Kai can do is watch the blood flow onto the snow, drips of rubies, drops of agonies.  
And it kills him.

~ Looks like love is pain  
Like broken wings  
The cruelly trampled flower ~

“It’ll all be over soon, I promise. When the moon is curved in a cheshire smile in the night, it’ll all be over.” Kai whispers into his neck, voice a slight tremble, heart a slight quiver, arms securely holding Taemin as though he might slip away. Slip through his fingers like snowflakes of Time. Lose himself to visions and ice once more. 

~ * ~

Thin forest mist snakes around their ankles, the curved scythe of moonlight casting dim silhouettes along the edges of leaves, mystery spreading its translucent fingers on every trembling breeze. 

There are four of them in the clearing, taught distance between them, dispersed like hesitant fireflies. The witch’s eyes are closed, turned to the astre, palms outstretched. The leopard sits quietly, paws posed perfectly at its front. The witch nods slightly, or so Kai thinks, and the leopard walks away, dissolving in the forest shadows. 

The witch finally turns with a sadistic grin.  
“So glad you came; the moon is perfect.”

“I do believe you know of my distaste towards your stalling. You say the conditions are perfect. Use them.”  
Kai snaps.

“You still must repent for your sins.”

“You cursed me, made me insane. You made me see things of hell, shivers of sin and echoes of demons. I saw my sins replay over, and over, and over again like a broken record, the sound bands ripped and the video static. I have spent my whole supplice with gut-wrenching agony and guilt. Don’t you dare come and demand for me to beg after being beaten.”  
Kai takes a daring step forward, anger heating his tanned skin to a shade of bronze under white light.

The witch’s expression turns deadly, skull-like reage echted on folds of spells and secrets of the dead.

“You first killed my sister, then you laughed at my face when you found my love unrequited. You, with your expensive expressions and lavish smirks, spat upon me like a stain on your diamond ring. My beautiful sister loved you, and I thought you did too. But you killed her. Mocked me. Hated my love. And so I killed you in return, my knife sinking deeper, the poison spreading far slower. It’s what you deserve, my duke. Played your cards on floats of champagne, and they mix and fade until you’ve realised you’ve lost, left with nothing. Drown in your sins until I am indeed, the last player at the table.”

“You loved a coward, an abusive monarch who dared call himself king. Your silly one-sided love made me laugh. Your sister had an affair with him, and then belittled me. It angered me. You say you’ve won, but, in the end, you’re just as lonely as I. Hiding fear behind fake power and ruffled feathers. Your sister never bothered to hide it. She was all obvious secrets, all bluff. But you proved otherwise for the family’s name. Maybe we’re all one, same, corrupt family playing stupid games on a roulette of love and death.”

“Kai-ah....”  
A soft female voice glides from behind the trees and sinks Kai’s feet to ice.  
Slowly, a girl in a silver corset and golden dress steps into the moonlight with a pointed foot, the curves of her throat soft, hair gleaming like a copper chalice as the moon-kiss drapes her in a delicate veil of ethereal beauty. 

Her eyes flash briefly in light, and Taemin notices, with a frown, how her blue irises seem imperiously cold, narrowed, almost dangerous. How strange crimson spots seem to sprinkle the fabric and her skin.

Kai’s face is blank of emotion, frozen to the very vein that pulsed through his fingertips, that curled almost instinctively as though they held a dagger. His head felt speared with icicles, and his nostrils quivered as though touched by a breeze of perfumed opium.  
He remains silent, even when she finally arrives, far enough for a tiger to run between them, but close enough for him to feel suffocated.

She cocks her head, rose-petaled lips humming a sad smile.  
“You’re beautiful tonight.”

Kai ignores the comment and lowers his gaze, throat dry.  
“Duchess.”

“Did you miss me? Your dagger seemed to love me more than you ever did.”

“You were cruel, you were heartless. Your secretive denamour doesn’t faze me anymore.”

“I loved you, Kai. Your luxurious beauty, plush and expensive, curls of smirks and dirty promises… I was intoxicated by you. Can’t you taste the smoke anymore? Don’t you long for the champagne on your tongue, the scent of sin?”

She reaches out, her fingertips brush over Kai’s jaw which clenches at her cold touch, linear smile.

Taemin scowls and slips an arm around Kai’s waist, stepping halfway in front. 

“Princess, he didn’t shove a dagger in your laced breast for nothing. Your love is unrequited, still. He screamed your name in agony and fear, and you dare try to lure him back to a world that died long ago. We are the present, our souls are already one. Go find another pretty boy to destroy.”  
Taemin spits venom in each word, Kai winces at the mention of madness but exhales at Taemin’s back against his chest. 

Her expression flickers into danger, but any harsh words die on her tongue when her eyes land on Kai. For his arm is around Taemin, gaze on Taemin, entire soul radiating with pure love for Taemin. Only Taemin, who stood grinning in challenge, for he knew this was a battle in which he already held the crown and she couldn’t lift a sword.

Tears well in her eyes. Real ones. For she had loved Kai. Her affair with the king… was something wretched. Lust for a simple higher status. But she had, even then, prefered Kai. However, her tongue was used to lies, and she thought it sounded delightful to play a dangerous game. But Kai had always been the better player.

She had even begged her sister to transform her soul into anything as long as she could see him. She had to be trapped inside the body of a dead snow leopard, with the task of fate. Finding the young king’s soulmate. She had to watch Kai fall in love with the boy, look at him with such utter devotion and admiration, something that had never been for her.  
She did love him.

“I know you missed me. You didn’t really mean it all, did you? I forgive you. Kai-ah, just kiss me one last time.”  
Her throat quivers like a luthe, the ocean eyes murmuring with sudden longing as she reaches out to touch his cheek.

Kai’s head snaps back to her, expression twisted in revulsion as he grabs her wrist.

“I’ve no care for your filthy words dressed in silver smiles that change in whimsical fashions. I came here to end my soulmate’s suffering, not to be beguiled by your fake charms or pitiful duels.”  
Kai finally speaks, poison saturating every letter that speaks of their corrupt past as his hold tightens on her thin arm, dark bruises already forming. 

“Let them be, Minyong. The spell must be performed now.”

The witch stands eyes closed before a pedestal in the middle of the circular clearing, a single bowl of crystalline water that glistens; a mirror of liquid moonlight.  
Her sister’s words are a blow to her pride, but the Duchess straightens herself, a sheen of ice already frozen in her eyes. 

Forgotten, the bejeweled hands that used to caress her in dark rooms.  
Returned, the glinting dagger as it glimmered in her chest, stained with blood.

“Maybe things will never change. My last chapter was dotted years ago. My fate has already been sealed. Ah, “fate”. “Destiny”. An old friend. Look at the way they gaze at each other. Is Fate truly my friend or my enemy? I shall think that Death is a sweet thing now. I shall think of it as a cold friend-yes, that is my comfort, for Life and Fate have no more care for me anymore. I’m a mere wandering star with no name.”

The duchess moves to the opposite point without a second glance, expression perfectly composed, heart perfectly empty, brushing off the encounter as though it were dust on her silk dress. A cold friend.

Taemin looks up at Kai with a sudden fear in his expression; his eyes are wide.  
Kai holds his soulmate in his arms and pulls him close. Their hearts even beat at the same rhythm.  
One… Two… Jump, Skip. One… Two... Jump, Skip.  
It echoes in their ears, courses through their tainted souls. 

“I love you”  
The words are soft, deep.  
They both know it true, yet they both long for its sweet taste on their tongue, rid of the dash of bitter madness.

Deep breaths  
Gentle caress

And the two slowly part. 

~~

“By this crescent moon  
A new kingdom shall renew  
When two souls of gold  
Unite,  
As two stars of silver,  
Thaw the cold.”

The chant is dark. A breeze rustles the leaves at their feet. 

“Pierce the darkness,  
Fray the veil of madness,  
A light.  
Oh! whisper of the spirit,  
Come drown the tongues of spite.”

A path of moonlight twirls from the silver chalice to the chest of each cursed man, who stands eyes closed, heart unraveled. The silver light dances inside them, warm, smooth.

“Drink,  
Sons of Adam.  
Quench the voices that sung,  
As they hung the innocent lamb.  
Hush the eyes that cried  
At the tomb of sweet demise.”

They each lift the single cup to each other’s lips, starry liquid like air on their tongues, fire to their throats.

Deadly,  
The blood of sin,  
Cleanse the tear of tragedy.  
Touched, the flame akin  
The whisper of a sweet melody.

Both step forward, eyes like milk marbles, listless, as they slice a single slit on their wrist.  
Three drops each.  
Six drops of blood trickle, run, fall into the bowl.  
The crimson liquid writhes, dances, drowns in lethal arabesques below the silver.

“Devil of the thought!  
Drop the reins of pain,  
To dance in your flame,  
For another spirit you sought!

Leave your black horse,  
To stomp the fields of remorse.  
Slice as heated scandal,  
Drip as melted candle.

The wind howls across their skin. The witch stands head tossed back, the madman’s smile beaming onto her from the inked sky, casting her outstretched palms, colorless eyes, into a corpse of hell.  
The water fades black.

Run,  
Demons of the soul!  
Pray,  
Shadows of His hold!

Shriek,  
Daughter of night!  
Die,  
Tongues of spite!

White hot pain flashes inside their heads.  
Both drop to their knees, screaming. It feels as though their brain is being compressed by tongues of iron still burning from the flame, ink oozing from each memory in agonizing drips, leaking into their eyes and palms until all is black.

Devil’s nails seem to claw Taemin’s back, ripping open numbed wounds, purring in pleasure at his cries of pain.

Perfumed opium seems to impregnate Kai’s senses, images flashing all too quickly, head spinning, breath quickening until he wants to burn his flesh. 

The spell is a symphony of hell;  
The screeching violins, who fiddle their strings to the soulmates’ cries,  
The howling wind as the deep bass that unsettles one’s chest,  
The prancing flute as the Duchess’ sadistic titter,  
And the possessed witch who stands as the conductor, hair wild, gestures frantic to stab the melody as a puppeteer, wheezing in delight at the crescendo of agony, holding her breath at the diminuendo of sighs. 

Darkness,  
Melt into the dying embers.

Flickering,  
The charred heart,  
Shed each crumbling vein,  
Strip each tainted shard  
‘Till each sin is slain.

Their eyes are closed, past lives flashing and echoing in their ears, leering and prancing across their skin. 

Kai hears the Duchess’ remarks playing like a broken record in his head; 

Spinning, scratches of laughter.  
“Don’t you long for the champagne on your tongue, the scent of sin?”

Spinning, blurred words.  
“Your dagger seemed to love me more than you ever did.”

Spinning, temptations.  
“Kai-ah, just kiss me one last time.”

He violently shakes his head, panting.  
He has to leave it all behind. He needed to be with Taemin. His thoughts frantically grasped for light, for his soulmate’s smile, latching onto fleeting memories with desperately silent tears.

 

Taemin sees his grandfather’s crown, the old king’s narrowed eyes.  
Faded silhouette in a dim room, floorboards creaking, heartbeat pounding.  
The fear. The cold wardrobe in which he hid, stuffy fur coats scratching his chin.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Come downstairs for dinner. It’ll be alright.”

Taemin can’t breathe.  
It hurts. The blood feels cold as it seems to trickle down his back. It hurts so much.

He needed Kai.  
He struggles for air, gasping for the reassurance of Kai’s arms, of his laugh, of everything that had made the pain go away. 

The air is silent with their short breaths, straining souls against chains of past.

The witch’s palms are burning, blood dripping from her wrists in strange patterns carved by whichever damned angel she had summoned. Her chest feels heavy, as though about to explode from magic, evil and flower. Her eyes are white, yet she sees all the joy and wonders of the past kingdom as though in a picture book. A smile lines her lips. Forgive and save the young duke, whose divine art must be unchained, in order to return her beloved kingdom its full, everlasting beauty. Chant the final verse.

 

“Leave,  
Wilted flowers of past.  
Rest in the bones of thieves  
of Love, with souls to last,  
The spring of winter is cast.”

The final verse is sung with a bittersweet melancholy, and the words of wilted flowers and discarded past strike a quivering cord inside the soulmates.  
Forgotten, the images of pain. Withered suddenly, the screams in memory.  
Their minds link as one, delicate harps moulding a beautifully tragic melody into one symphony of spiritual love.

“I have already died because of sin, I have already screamed because of your touch.  
You are past, you are Death’s ghost.  
Now, I am alive, I rest the bouquet of bare flowers in your tomb, to turn, facing the sun.”

The soulmates’ minds echoed these words with the same bittersweet determination, dusting glass hearts wreathed in velvet.  
The pain flickered away, the visions sunk into the waters of black with the last silent syllable. Their eyelids eased open with soft surprise.

“Take me out from the rotten memories  
Drench my dried up heart,  
Take my hand, ‘till the end  
So I can live for you again.”

Their gazes meet, their lips mouth the same words.  
It shows on their expressions; the relief.  
It shows on their relaxed shoulders; the absence of past.  
They sigh. It’s beautiful, relaxed, a breath of art and love.

A grin breaks out on their faces. It’s a mere twitch of the lip at first, as a newly hatched bird fluttering its wings on the edge of the nest. Then, it’s swooping, glorious, breaking out into a radiant smile in the morning sun.

Dawn has broken.  
Gone, the cold white light  
Come, the warmed sun kiss  
Touching lips,  
Caressing faces.

As they hold each other, they shed a tear.  
But for the first time, it’s not out of agony too hard for the body and soul to bear. This time, it’s out of joy, overflowing in crystalline waterfalls from the heart and spirit. 

They don’t speak.  
Words are too mundane for the shudder of relief that cleanses one’s soul, for the sigh of love that breathes in their eyes.

No real Poet ever wove in numbers  
All his dream; but the diviner part,  
Hidden from all the world, spake to him only  
In the voiceless silence of his heart.  
So with Love: for Love and Art united  
Are twin mysteries; different, yet the same:  
Poor indeed would be the love of any  
Who could find its full and perfect name. ~A.A. Procter

Kai’s arms are warm around Taemin, eyes shimmering as diamonds embedded with crystals of passion, an expression of triumph, over even his dancing soul.

Taemin’s hands cup Kai’s neck, face, caressing each smooth line, tender love flowing from his chest into his palms, expression as soft as the burning star, the life of the beautiful artist who walked into a castle of dark and touched the soul of glass.

They’re divine. Glowing, beautiful. Reborn as the sun glistening upon turquoise waters, sighing under a mermaid’s sweet song with poems of raging storms past.

They were the lyrics of the prophecy that spoke of dreamful love, the soulmates of a world that spun sin and light into a thousand blazing stars of passion. 

 

~ * ~


	3. ~ Epilogue ~

Two spirits who moulded together, the way colored sand layers itself grain by grain, dark by light, sin by love.

The Sun turns its shy face to the Moon,  
Who blushes sweet.  
The delicate butterfly sheds her cocoon,  
To flutter, softly, to the child’s rosy cheek.  


A blade of grass has speared the ice,  
A daisy grows from the snow.  
The kaleidoscope of light  
Filters through the stainless window.  


The robin sings and the flowers sigh  
For the soulmates-whose thrones are high  
Upon the oceans of love, and hills of angels above-  
Are united,  
To the path of eternity that unravels itself,  
As life preambulates to lose one’s self,  
In crulean petals and passionnate red.  
~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it all! If you did like it, please don't hesitate to show your support by commenting, liking or sharing! <3


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